Your middle-of-the-week to-do list ...
One can actually see Justin sweat over this:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last night rejected a House affairs committee motion that he immediately call a public inquiry into foreign meddling in federal elections. His refusal set cabinet in conflict with Members of Parliament over control of the investigation into alleged criminal breaches of the Canada Elections Act: “Unbelievable.”
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A House affairs committee report demanding an independent inquiry into elections is expected to be tabled today in the Commons. The tabling would trigger an inevitable showdown between Parliament and the Prime Minister over control of the investigation of foreign agents: “We’re straying into banana republic territory here.”
Straying?
Oh, no! You're there.
After all, the most pressing thing is not that China was fixing elections but who told everyone that they were.
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Liberal MPs on the House affairs committee yesterday filibustered a vote to question political aides and party organizers regarding foreign election interference. MP Jennifer O’Connell (Pickering-Uxbridge, Ont.) dismissed critics as “spy kids” angling for editorial approval in the Toronto Sun: “You got a tweet out of it, right?”
Sure thing, Jenny:
Liberal MP Han Dong is alleged to have been helped by the Chinese consulate in Toronto during his 2019 nomination race, by bussing in seniors & students to vote for him, according to CSIS docs & sources
— Mackenzie Gray (@Gray_Mackenzie) February 24, 2023
CSIS asked the PM's senior staff to rescind Dong's nomination, per sources pic.twitter.com/cMSlObsPwt
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To tackle electoral interference he is going to: appoint a special rapporteur; start consultations on a new foreign influence transparency register; establish a “counter foreign influence co-ordinator” in the Public Safety Canada department; order new investigations by the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) and the national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians (NSICOP); and spend $5.5 million on civil society organizations to combat misinformation and review previous committee recommendations and reports on electoral interference.
Rather than getting serious about this issue, everything he announced is merely smoke and mirrors — a lame attempt at misdirection by a poor magician who has long lost the ability to fool people.
There are a lot of questions that his proposals will not answer, such as:
Were the Liberals briefed by national security officials that at least one Liberal candidate in 2019 was allegedly part of a Chinese interference network? And did they wilfully ignore that warning because it was to their advantage? Did they know that 11 candidates in that election, nine of them Liberal, according to the Globe and Mail, were favoured by Beijing? Were Trudeau and his advisers also briefed about China working to defeat Conservative candidates in 2021 so that a Liberal minority government could be elected? Did they know, as the Globe has reported, that the former Chinese consul general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, bragged in 2021 about helping to defeat two Conservative candidates?
The heart of this scandal isn’t that there has been electoral interference; it’s that the Liberals allegedly knew that there was electoral interference but did nothing because it was to their benefit.
One of the most damning statements in the leaks from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service is a quote from a Chinese consulate official who said, “The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the PRC (People’s Republic of China) can support.”
It is for this reason that we need a public inquiry to get at what the Liberals knew, when they learned about it and what they did or didn’t do with that information. Instead, Trudeau is making a big deal of appointing an independent special rapporteur who “will have a wide mandate.” You bet he will.
The two intelligence reports, from 2019 and 2022, raise questions about what senior federal officials knew about the alleged funding by a foreign interference network and how seriously the Trudeau government took the warnings.
One is a “Special Report” prepared by the Privy Council Office for the Trudeau government and was date-stamped January 2022. The memo was also finalized, suggesting it was intended to be read by Trudeau and his senior aides.
Reviewed by Global News, it asserted that Chinese officials in Toronto had disbursed money into a covert network tasked to interfere in Canada’s 2019 election.
“A large clandestine transfer of funds earmarked for the federal election from the PRC Consulate in Toronto was transferred to an elected provincial government official via a staff member of a 2019 federal candidate,” the PCO report stated.
And let's not forget this:
The RCMP says it’s still investigating two scientists ejected from Canada’s top infectious disease lab almost four years ago, sparking debate about whether the force is up to the task — or the government is committed to seeing through the potentially embarrassing case.
An RCMP spokeswoman said the investigation, with its overtones of possible snooping by China, is still ongoing and that police would have no comment on it. Such cases cannot always be wrapped up quickly, said Cpl. Kim Chamberland.
Or at all.
Not investigating; sitting on.
Years of being told what to do by a prime minister's unaccomplished son was too much for him.
That and the Chinese interference.
Canada is literally a crap-hole:
A Maine company is sending close to 130 truckloads of sewage sludge a month across the border to New Brunswick after the state’s landfill warned of a capacity glut.
Casella Waste Systems, a Vermont-based company that operates the 122 acre landfill north of Bangor, ME said it lacked enough dry bulky waste to stabilize the wet sludge due to a ban on importing out-of-state waste last month.
More than two dozen Border Patrol officers have been transferred to the northern border to respond to a historic spike in the number of Mexican immigrants crossing into the United States from Canada, according to a report.
Customs and Border Protection has assigned 25 extra agents to a busy section of the Canadian frontier that borders New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, NBC News reported on Monday, citing an agency spokesperson.
Some of the reassigned agents were pulled from their previous duties on the US-Mexican border, the report said.
Who did you vote for, Canada?:
The majority of Canadians say they don’t have more than two-months worth of savings, according to a new poll.
In the Maru poll released on Tuesday, 62% of Canadians reported they lacked more than two months of savings to cover unexpected costs in the following 60 days.
Those who lacked savings were most likely to be from Alberta (48%), and the most common age demographic was between 18 and 34 (47%).
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More than a third of households have difficulty paying grocery bills, Statistics Canada data showed yesterday. MPs on the Commons agriculture committee blamed a lack of competition among grocers: “It’s a painful experience every time they are going to the grocery store.”
It's still the best healthcare system in the world as long as one doesn't remember the faults:
More than 14,000 Canadians died while waiting for surgery, diagnostic scans, or other health services between April 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, according to an updated report published March 2.The report by non-profit think tank SecondStreet.org cited updated government data from three provinces and calculated that 14,057 Canadians died while on wait lists during the 2021–2022 fiscal year. This is 476 more than the 13,581 figure cited in the original report released in December 2022.The data indicate that the cases include a wide array of health services—from hip operations and heart surgery to CT and MRI scans. Before dying while on a waiting list, patients had waited anywhere from less than a month to over eight years. Many died after waiting longer than the recommended wait time, said the report.“The pandemic made a bad situation worse, but Canadians should know this was a growing problem well before COVID arrived,” said SecondStreet.org President Colin Craig in a Dec. 13, 2022, news release.Each year, SecondStreet.org files freedom of information requests with health regions and provincial health bodies nationwide to obtain data on the number of patients who had been removed from waiting lists for surgery, diagnostic scans, and specialist appointments due to death. The organization also tracks the number of patients on wait-lists overall across Canada.Some provinces extensively track and collect wait-time statistics, while some collect very little or none at all, said SecondStreet.org.“With the exception of the province of Nova Scotia, provincial governments and their respective health bodies do not break down the number of patient deaths potentially linked to the state taking too long to provide needed services,” said Craig in a March 2 news release.“Oddly, governments across Canada routinely require businesses to detail even the most minor workplace injuries such as accidents where employees are bruised as a result. If this is something businesses must track, why can’t the government tell us how many patients are dying due to long waiting lists?” he added.In December 2022, the organization said data showed that waiting list deaths were at a four-year high since it began tracking the information in 2018–2019, and that surgical waiting list deaths were up more than 24 percent over the past four years.
Also - as we knew:
Before the pandemic, clinical trials repeatedly showed little or no benefit from wearing masks in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses like flu and colds. That was why, in their pre-2020 plans for dealing with a viral pandemic, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and other national public health agencies did not recommend masking the public. But once Covid-19 arrived, magical thinking prevailed. Officials ignored the previous findings and plans, instead touting crude and easily debunked studies purporting to show that masks worked.
The gold standard for medical evidence is the randomized clinical trial, and the gold standard for analyzing this evidence is Cochrane (formerly the Cochrane Collaboration), the world’s largest and most respected organization for evaluating health interventions. Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and other nations’ health agencies, it’s an international network of reviewers, based in London, that has partnerships with the WHO and Wikipedia. Medical journals have hailed it for being “the best single resource for methodologic research” and for being “recognized worldwide as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare.”
It has published a new Cochrane review of the literature on masks, including trials during the Covid-19 pandemic in hospitals and in community settings. The trials compared outcomes of wearing surgical masks versus wearing no masks, and also wearing surgical masks versus N95 masks. The review, conducted by a dozen researchers from six countries, concludes that wearing any kind of face covering “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of respiratory illness.
It may seem intuitive that masks must do something. But even if they do trap droplets from coughs or sneezes (the reason that surgeons wear masks), they still allow tiny viruses to spread by aerosol even when worn correctly—and it’s unrealistic to expect most people to do so. While a mask may keep out some pathogens, its inner surface can also trap concentrations of pathogens that are then breathed back into the lungs.
Whatever theoretical benefits there might be, in clinical trials the benefits have turned out to be either illusory or offset by negative factors. Oxford’s Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, summed up the real science on masks: “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.”
I don't know what people expected out of Bills C-11 and C-18.
Both were meant to control everything you see and hear:
The amendment aimed to exclude social media content from the online streaming bill, which critics have charged gives the broadcast regulator too much power to over online content.
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If officials envision turning to TikTok for mandated payments despite the absence of links, their vision of the scope of “facilitating access to news” could treat access to news as awareness of news and thereby extend to little more than discussing or engaging with news on a large platform that otherwise qualifies as a “digital news intermediary”. That would obviously scope in activity that goes beyond reproduction, linking or even indexing. It would simply involve individual Canadians exercising basic rights of freedom of expression. Indeed, if the Heritage officials who spoke to Senator Simons are serious about such an expansive definition, Bill C-18 is more than just link tax. It is effectively a tax on large Internet platforms for the free expression of their users with only tenuous link to compensating news organizations for the “use” of news at all. The government and news lobbying sector willingness to cavalierly undermine the most fundamental of freedoms in pursuit of political expediency or a government-enforced payout through payments for links is shameful. If they were to expand the scope of demands to even include discussion or engagement with news – basic expression – it would be unforgivable.
In Canada, young people aged 15 to 24 are more likely to experience mental illness and/or substance use disorders than any other age group according to The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada's largest mental health teaching hospital. Their research indicates in any given year, 1 in 5 Canadians experiences a mental illness. By the time Canadians reach 40 years of age, 1 in 2 have — or have had — a mental illness.
Amid this disturbing increase in mental illness, especially among young people, Canada expanded its physician-assisted suicide, now termed Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID). In 2021, the height of the COVID social upheaval, the Legislature expanded the eligibility of MAID to the following ailments:
- have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability (excluding a mental illness until March 17, 2023)
- be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability
- have enduring and intolerable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable
Physical or psychological suffering? What is the difference between psychological suffering and mental illness? This could describe millions, especially since COVID.
One of the most disturbing of all aspects of the MAID report is that in 2021, 2.2% of the total number receiving assistance in dying were individuals "whose natural deaths were not reasonably foreseeable." In other words, their deaths were not imminent.
The expansion to the mentally ill was to go into effect on March 17, 2023, but thankfully, Canadians received a reprieve from the government until next year. The one-year extension, according to the government, would "provide additional time to prepare for the safe and consistent assessment and provision of MAID where the person's sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness."
Mental illness is not a comorbidity and should not be a death warrant.
In fact, the opposite should be true. These are the most vulnerable in our society, the most susceptible to coercion. And, according to these reports, the people suffering from these issues can be helped in any number of ways.
Also - I will bet PM Blackface is livid that actual black people stand up to him:
Ugandan Member of Parliament Lucy Akello spoke to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development on Tuesday, telling the Canadian government that her nation is not interested in abortion being tied to international aid from developed countries like Canada.
Akello opened with a strong statement directed toward the efforts of the Canadian government to push a pro-abortion mentality on Africans, stating: “About abortion, our people are still loyal to religious truth and cultures… it seems no matter how much money will be spent on making abortion look good, our people still see through the money, the marketing and mass education…”
Well, I'm shocked to learn this:
Federal prisoners allowed to serve time at Indigenous healing lodges have a higher recidivism rate than those held in regular cells, says a federal report. Healing lodges feature arts and crafts, skating and book clubs, said the Correctional Service: “Emphasis for hobby crafts would be on traditional Indigenous arts and crafts such as rattle making or beadwork.”
(Sidebar: yet prisoners make better students than college snowflakes. Hhhmm ...)
And - when the electorate changes, the anti-semitism rises:
A small protest was held outside the offices of Nova Scotia’s education department, after some students were allegedly told to take off their traditional Palestinian scarves at a Halifax school last week.
A couple dozen people gathered at the offices on Brunswick Street on Monday afternoon, to call for an official apology, investigation and better cultural training in schools.
“Asking them to take off the identity symbol for us is really painful. It’s racism,” said Lana Khammash, the president of the Atlantic Canada Palestinian Society.
It's also painful to kill Israelis.
China's military spending is a lot of smoke and mirrors:
The declared total of China’s newly increased defence budget at 1.56 trillion yuan amounts to $230 billion, according to the current exchange rate. If that were the case, it would mean that China is falling further behind the United States, whose own fiscal 2023 defence spending is increasing to $797 billion (and actually more, since that figure does not include its funding for military construction or the added help to Ukraine).
China’s own figure is also generally assumed by experts to be greatly understated — not by fiddling the numbers one by one, but rather by wholesale exclusions, such as the attribution of research-and-development spending to civilian budgets. Even if a commando team of elite forensic accountants were sent into action to uncover China’s actual defence spending, with another team dispatched to determine what’s missing from the US budget, we would still only have a very loose indication of how much actual military strength China and the United States hope to add.But one thing can be said with absolute certainty: each side is adding less than the rising numbers imply.In China’s case, a manpower shortage undercuts military spending in the PLA’s ground forces and naval forces, and soon it will affect manned air units as well. The PLA ground forces now stand at some 975,000, a very small number for a country that has 13,743 miles of borders with 14 countries — including extreme high-mountain borders where internal combustion engines lose power, jungle-covered borders where remote observation is spoiled by foliage, Russian-river borders with endemic smuggling, and the border with India’s Ladakh where an accumulation of unresolved Chinese intrusions have forced each side to deploy substantial ground forces, with at least 80,000 on the Chinese side.Except for Ladakh, which now resembles a war-front, borders are not supposed to be guarded by army troops but by border police. And China did in fact have a substantial dedicated border force, but it was abolished for the same reason that the PLA ground army is so small: a crippling shortage of physically fit Chinese men willing to serve in these regions. Cities and towns, by contrast, do not seem afflicted by such severe manpower shortages, leading to the weird phenomenon on Nepal’s main border crossing to Tibet where, according to an acquaintance, a group of freezing Cantonese city policemen were checking travellers and “guarding the border”. (They said they had been “volunteered” for two months.)Even the Party’s strong-arm “People’s Armed Police” — China’s equivalent of the uniformed and combat-armed French Gendarmerie, Italian Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza, and Spain’s Guardia Civil — is affected by the refusal of young Chinese men to serve. Its 1.5 million total may sound like a lot, but Italy has 150,000 Carabinieri and Finanzieri for a 60-million population — 10% of the numbers for 5% of the population. And Italy does not have to allocate vast numbers of armed men to corral and control Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang, Tibetan herdsmen or severely disaffected Mongols.
Also - now one knows why the Chinese are buying up North American land:
Xi is correct to recognize that preserving farmland is an indispensable factor in the quest to achieve food self-sufficiency. China has experienced alarming levels of farmland loss and deterioration in recent years. The most recent land use survey showed that China’s total arable land decreased from 334 million acres in 2013 to 316 million acres in 2019, a loss of more than 5 percent in just six years. Shockingly, more than one-third of China’s remaining arable land (660 million mu, a traditional unit of land measurement in China and equal to roughly 109 million acres, slightly larger than Montana) suffers from problems of degradation, acidification, and salinization.
The land has been eroding faster in recent years. The annual net decrease of arable land has risen from about 6 million mu (about 988,421 acres) from 1957 to 1996 to more than 11 million mu (about 1.8 million acres) from 2009 to 2019. This means that between 2009 and 2019, China lost farmland equal to about the size of South Carolina. China’s diminishing farmland is also losing productivity due to over-cultivation and excess use of fertilizers. China’s fertilizer usage in 2018 was 6.4 times that of 1978, but grain yield in 2018 was only 2.2 times that of 1978.
As in many other countries, such as the United States and India, a major cause for China’s farmland deterioration has been its land-intensive industrialization and urbanization over the past three decades. Farmland has been expropriated to meet the strong demand for land to support the expansion of manufacturing, infrastructure, and urban development. Competing interests for land use have resulted in arable land being expropriated for more lucrative development projects. In the contest for land use among food growers, cash-crop planters, and property developers, profit maximization often trumps the needs of food farmers, especially when imported foods are much cheaper than locally grown options.
Do note the heavy-set white liberals' shock, horror and dismay when not allowed to steal:
Now you know why so many are insisting on keeping the masks. 😳 pic.twitter.com/Yylrkq0iFn
— The Black Spiderman🕷🕸 (@theblackspiderm) March 6, 2023
Also:
People living in Toronto feel less safe on public transit than other Canadians, according to a new Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News.
The poll suggests 44 per cent of Toronto residents feel unsafe riding transit alone. That compares to 35 per cent of riders in the 905 region around Toronto and 27 per cent across the country.
“In general people do feel safe riding transit. There’s a quarter of the population that doesn’t really feel safe, regardless of where you go,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos, told Global News.
“What we’re seeing in the data is that this really seems to be a Toronto issue, and particularly a downtown Toronto issue in the 416 area, where people have been seeing a lot of reporting on various incidents on the public transit system, and it spooked them.”
This new polling comes after a series of high-profile and violent attacks on Toronto’s transit system. It includes a fatal stabbing at the High Park subway station, a reported sexual assault on a bus, a driver allegedly shot in the face with a BB gun and an incident in which a group of teenagers allegedly swarmed a TTC worker.
How awkward when a long-held myth is smashed asunder:
From January to September 1968, North Vietnamese forces launched a coordinated series of attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam, proof that American forces had failed to quash the guerilla combatants. Death squads made their way through the cities, killing anyone who wasn't joining their revolution. Captured in a building in the Cho Lon quarter of Saigon, Nguyễn Văn Lém was a member of the Viet Cong whose downfall began in the Tet Offensive. Allegedly Lém was arrested for cutting the throats of South Vietnamese Lt Col Nguyen Tuan, his wife, their six children and the officer's 80-year-old mother. On top of that, he was leading a Viet Cong team whose whole deal was taking out members of the National Police and their families. A the time of his death, Lém should have been considered a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention, but because he was dressed in civilian clothing and he wasn't carrying a firearm, he was technically seen as an "illegal combatant."
During the Tet Offensive, Lém was on a bloodthirsty tear through Saigon. He may look boyish, but he had the heart of a killer. The photo shows Lém handcuffed and in civilian clothing, but he was operating a death squad that had killed 34 that same day. He allegedly took out seven police officers, multiple members of their families, and even a few Americans. Each victim was bound by their wrists and shot in the back of the head, execution style. Because he wasn't wearing the outfit of a solider this put him in a bad scenario. As a person committing war crimes he was in a bad way, especially with General Loan coming after him. Not only had he carried out a gruesome act, but he was eligible for immediate execution.
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To this day media accounts describe Sicknick as someone who was quote slain on January 6, the video we reviewed proves that is a lie. Here's surveillance footage of Sicknick walking in the capitol after he was supposedly murdered by the mob outside. by all appearances Sicknick is healthy and vigorous.
Not everyone can look outside their window and have a direct view of a wonder of the world. But that’s the reality for Rio de Janeiro resident Fernando Braga.
The Brazilian lives with his wife and kids and a direct view of the nearly 100-foot Christ the Redeemer structure, which portrays Jesus Christ with his arms open wide.
But Braga’s view isn’t the reason he went viral a month ago. It was his determination as a photographer, capturing a stunning time-lapse video and screenshots of lightning striking the sculpture, after more than 30 attempts.
“It was unbelievable at first. Like a dream come true, since I was trying for a long time. At that moment, I was expecting to get some lightning around the frame, but not like this one,” Braga told Yahoo News.
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| I have the POWER! |
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